The Oklahoma City Thunder grew up on Sunday.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 35 points, Jalen Williams added 24 and the Thunder rolled into the Western Conference finals, beating the Denver Nuggets 125-93 in Game 7 in Oklahoma City.

The top-seeded Thunder will host the sixth-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves starting Tuesday. It’s Oklahoma City’s first trip to the conference finals since 2016.

Oklahoma City went a league-best 68-14 in the regular season, becoming the youngest team to win at least 60 games. To back up their status as the best team in the league, the Thunder had to get past three-time MVP Nikola Jokic and a Denver squad that won the NBA title in 2023 and beat the Los Angeles Clippers in seven games in the first round this year.

Coach Mark Daigneault said his players handled the pressure well.

“There’s not many games, you wake up in the morning and you know that you’re going to remember the game for the rest of your life, and Game 7 is one of them,” he said. “To be able to focus through that and perform the way these guys did today was very impressive.”

Jokic had 20 points, 9 rebounds and 7 assists for the Nuggets. Aaron Gordon, a key player for Denver throughout the playoffs who hit the winner in Game 1 against the Thunder, started despite a strained left hamstring. He had eight points and 11 rebounds in 24 minutes.

“What he played with today, I don’t know many people that would even attempt to go out there and run up and down,” Nuggets interim coach David Adelman said. “And he did it in Game 7 against Oklahoma City on the road. That that was one of most incredible things I’ve ever seen. He was extremely close to not playing. I was surprised.”

The Thunder fell behind by 11 in the first quarter, but took the lead early in the second. Oklahoma City outscored Denver 39-20 in the period to take a 60-46 lead at the break.

Gordon was called for a flagrant-1 foul for elbowing Gilgeous-Alexander in the face early in the third quarter. Gilgeous-Alexander made both free throws, and then Williams hit a short jumper to give Oklahoma City a 66-46 lead.

Cason Wallace got loose on a fastbreak and dunked on Jokic to put the Thunder up 78-57, sparking roars from the crowd.

Oklahoma City cruised from there and now hopes to make another leap.

“We’re better now than we were at the beginning of the series, and it’s because of them,” Daigneault said. “They pushed us to the limit.”

Final four is set

The parity era continues in the NBA.

The New York Knicks haven’t won an NBA championship since 1973. The Indiana Pacers won their most recent title that year — in the ABA. The Oklahoma City Thunder franchise has one title in its history, that coming in 1979 when the team called Seattle home. And the Minnesota Timberwolves have never even been to the NBA Finals.

Meet the NBA’s final four.

When Commissioner Adam Silver hands one of those teams the Larry O’Brien Trophy next month, it’ll mark a league first — seven championship franchises in a seven-year span.

There hasn’t been a back-to-back NBA champion since the Warriors in 2017 and 2018. From there, the list of champions goes like this: Toronto in 2019, the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020, Milwaukee in 2021, the Warriors in 2022, Denver in 2023 and Boston last season.

It’s the longest such run of different champions in NBA history; Major League Baseball, the NHL and the NFL have all had longer ones, and not too long ago, either.

But for the NBA, this is different. The league wanted unpredictability, especially after four consecutive Cleveland vs. Warriors title matchups from 2015 through 2018.

And things have been highly unpredictable since. No matter what the Finals matchup is this year, the NBA will be seeing 11 conference-champion franchises in the span of seven seasons.

“We’ve still got eight more wins to achieve our ultimate goal,” Minnesota coach Chris Finch said. “We’ve still got two more series. We’re only halfway there.”

The season is over for 26 of the NBA’s 30 clubs. But the fun stuff is just starting.

The Eastern Conference finals — No. 4 seed Indiana vs. No. 3 seed New York — begin Wednesday night in Manhattan. The Pacers lost the East finals a year ago.

“You’ve got to have big dreams,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “You don’t know how often you’re going to be in this position.”

Indeed, the championship window for teams doesn’t seem to be staying open as long as it did in the past. Boston was a huge favorite to win its second straight title; the Celtics didn’t get out of Round 2, in part because they couldn’t hold on to big leads and in part because Jayson Tatum ruptured his right Achilles tendon.

There are only seven players left — Indiana’s Pascal Siakam, Aaron Nesmith and Thomas Bryant; Knicks teammates P.J. Tucker, Cam Payne and Mikal Bridges; and Oklahoma City’s Alex Caruso — who have appeared in an NBA Finals game.